The coffin, draped in the colours of the Turkish flag, was escorted to the small cemetery in Didim on the Aegean coast by a crowd of several hundred people and carried by white-helmeted riot police, reserved for martyrs who fell in combat.
As soon as her death was announced, Ankara, which opened an investigation, strongly denounced this “arbitrary assassination” attributed to the Israeli army: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan assured that his country would do everything “so that the death of our daughter, Aysenur Ezgi, does not go unpunished.”
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The government and opposition took their places among the relatives, including Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and Interior Minister Ali Verlikyaya, surrounded by a crowd chanting slogans hostile to Israel and the United States as the body arrived: “Israel, killers” and “Palestine from the river to the sea.”
The 26-year-old, a recent graduate of the University of Washington with degrees in psychology and Middle Eastern studies and languages, arrived in the United States with her family when she was 10 months old but frequently returned to the family’s hometown of Didim, an uncle, Ali Tikkim, told AFP.
His body arrived in Turkey on Friday from Tel Aviv and was immediately taken to Izmir, the country’s third city on the western coast, where a new autopsy confirmed his death by “firearm”, reported public television TRT.
TRT noted…
- ParisMatch
